Annunciation with Saint Emidius, by Carlo Crivelli, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a Senate permitting reform bill, the potential of Tesla’s Cybercab, the Navy’s $200 billion worth of shipyard renovations, a possible plan to return a SR-71 to service, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing...

For the past decade, every time I went up to the mountains here in my area, I got the chance to look at one particular mountain ridge standing there silently in the background. It spans roughly 30km, east to west. On one side, the Slovenian one, there’s the town of Kobarid. On the other, just more mountains. I’ve considered walking this ridge for years, every time making a different plan for how to tackle it. Some people do it in multiple days, sleeping either outside or in one of the va...

My late grandad Jim had a Commodore PET, which he delighted in showing me around when we’d come back to Australia to visit relatives in the 1990s. I’d consider the PET another of my grail retrocomputers, but I also acknowledge I’ll never have the space for such a large machine… even assuming I could afford one in working condition thesedays. But I’m a step closer to the real thing now, thanks to this machine! This is my beloved PAL VC-20 , the uncommon version of the Commodore...

Earlier this week I asked a question on Mastodon: “Who are the Jane Goodalls and David Attenboroughs of software?” Goodall was a primatologist best known for decades of research on chimpanzees, and Attenborough has been making nature documentaries longer than I’ve been alive. Both are well-known to the general public (at least in the English speaking world) and have been powerful forces for good. Which means that the answer to my question is, “We don’t have any.” If you ask som...

Anthropic released new eval tooling for Claude Code . Their claude-api plugin now includes a new build_eval and hill-climb command that helps you build evals, check the graders, and improve your application against them. I usually don’t review eval tools because software changes so often that reviews have a short shelf life. But a first-party tool from Anthropic is likely to influence how people approach evals, so I wanted to try it and share what I found. Isaac Flath and I livest...

0.0 Context setting Thursday 29 September in Portland, Oregon, where it is dreary but also not raining. Dreary kind of implies rain? Some sort of pregnantly dreary, I suppose. Gravid with rain but not raining yet. Anticipatory. It’s been just over a week since the last episode and I’ve got to say that every day that I haven’t written I’ve gotten more anxious about not having written. This is not generally speaking helpful because I don’t know about you, but it’s easier to writ...

Listen I understand that technically I am capable of wearing a sweater at anytime but that’s not what I mean and you know it I can’t wear a sweater right this minute because it’s the hottest part of the day and the hottest part of the day is still a little too hot for sweater. But morning? Evening? SWEATER TIME.  Also I’ve never really thought about the word sweater before and is it the word we used because this is an item of clothing that makes you sweat, hypotheti...

The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... ... Read More Read More

In the 1960s and ’70s, colorful comic book advertisements from the Transcience Corporation in New York City promised to mail anyone who sent cash, check, or money order a “bowlfull of happiness” — in reality, a small paper envelope of freeze-dried eggs. Dropped into salt water, the eggs would produce brine shrimp, also known as sea monkeys. Brine shrimp are about a centimeter long and swim… Source In the 1960s and ’70s, colorful comic book advertisements from the Transcience Corpo...

Walking through the Royal Mile, I noticed the faint – then increasing – scent of coffee in the air coming from a popular bakery. It is morning. I continued walking for a little while, en route to one of my preferred coffee shops. There, the baristas were laughing, one exchanging stories from Scottish history with a hint of humour, the other listening joyfully. Whereas in past weeks the sound of the espresso machine first piques my interest, today it was the sound of laughter, and the joy ...

some strong feels as I try to navigate this. some strong feels as I try to navigate this. some strong feels as I try to navigate this. some strong feels as I try to navigate this.

Building and testing the aircraft in the two states is projected to support about 9,800 American jobs by the early 2030s and add roughly $78 billion to the Newton and Seattle economies through 2046. NEWTON, Kan. and DES MOINES, Wash., (September 30, 2026) — Shield AI today named the two sites that will build and test X-BAT , its AI-piloted fighter jet designed to take off and land vertically. X-Forge 2, at the Newton City-County Airport in Kansas, is the flight test and sustainment home for...

"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë - good writing, but the protagonists are quite something. There's barely a likable character in the whole story - they are all either crazy, evil, stupid or a combination of these. It's also remarkable to consider how small the world of some people in those times was (pre-Victorian England); whole lives spent within a tiny area, interacting with a handful of other people. And that's for members of the nobility, not some bumpkin on a remote farm. "The Pickle...

I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options . I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging...

Our Moon as imaged by the Galileo spacecraft flying past it on December 7, 1992. Image: NASA Many people think that the Moon is just a gray ball of rock in our sky. Surprisingly, many scientists seem to share this notion. I once had a physicist tell me the Moon is scientifically boring. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. So I wrote this article to summarize the immense scientific and exploratory value of Earth’s cosmic companion. Firstly, consider that the bootprints of Apollo astrona...

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might...

Cisco had about 82,400 employees on July 25, 2026, down from 86,200 a year earlier, while fiscal 2026 revenue reached $63.3 billion. This guide tracks Cisco employee statistics from SEC filings and Cisco’s purpose reporting: yearly headcount, three restructuring plans, California WARN notices, demographics, pay and workplace rankings. Cisco Employee Statistics 2026 82,400 Employees as of July 25, 2026 8,000 Fewer employees than on July 27, 2024 29% Women in the global workforce, J...

The idea of “superpersuasion” has been floating around the AI safety community for decades. Now that powerful and difficult-to-control LLMs have appeared, people are again talking about the idea that a sufficiently intelligent AI might be able to persuade people to do whatever it wants. The classic 1 version of this idea is an AI persuading some engineer to “let it out of the box”: to grant it access to the internet. The modern version of this idea is t...

A common way to store JSON data is to write one document per line. We call it NDJSON or JSON Lines. Log files, database exports and machine-learning datasets often come in this format. The files can be large, so we may compress them. { "id" : 1 , "active" : true , "user" :{ "name" : "user_1" , "tags" :[ "guest" ]}, "score" : -3862 , "note" : "..." } { "id" : 2 , "active" : false , "user" :{ "name" : "user_2" , "tags" :[ "staff" , "admin" ]}, "score" : 8123 , "note" : "..." } How fast...

Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the principles that follow from that idea — control over the rate of knowledge exposition, tight coupling between slides and speaker, minimalism by default, visuals that say more than words can, and never sending your slides out in advance. more… Not every present...

I got the following question in an email. My nephew is currently in high school in China and has developed a strong interest in computer science and mathematics. Recently, we've been talking about how computers can solve incredibly complex problems, yet there are still some problems that even the most powerful computers struggle to handle efficiently. I work in backend data maintenance myself, so I often think about how much a system's performance depends on the way a problem is approached,...

Serde is an amazing serialization library for Rust and it has been a huge reason why I felt productive with it for years. However already while at Sentry I got quite frustrated with some of the limitations with it but actually replacing Serde is tricky because of the might that it has in the ecosystem. Also because it’s quite hard to actually do better without also making some potentially painful compromises. Here are three examples of Serde corner cases that show poor interactions of Ser...